A Look at "Mockingbird Years" by Emily Fox Gordon
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Transcript of A Look at "Mockingbird Years" by Emily Fox Gordon
A Look at Mockingbird Years 1 Running head: MOCKINGBIRD YEARS
A Look at Mockingbird Years
Ray Woodcock
University of Michigan
School of Social Work
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In Mockingbird Years: A Life In and Out of Therapy, Emily Fox Gordon (2000) provides
an account of her experiences as a client of mental health practitioners.1 That account includes
institutionalization, psychoanalysis, unethical professional conduct, orthodox practice, heterodox
practice, and other therapy-related topics. In the broad picture, Emily – who was in her early 50s
at time of publication – presents a tale of transition in attitudes toward therapy, from youthful
romanticism through various phases of exploration and disillusionment, to a complex,
conditional acceptance and simultaneous rejection of therapy. Her writing style is intelligent and
provocative. It makes for a quick and relatively engaging read.
Those are the sorts of praise that I encountered when I was trying to select a book for this
assignment – in, especially, readers’ reviews at Amazon.com (2009). Mockingbird Years
(referred to here as MY) appeared likely to provide a critical and self-critical look at client
experiences in mental health. That is, I hoped for a balanced presentation, with sympathetic but
not overindulged portrayals of client and therapist perspectives. I also wanted a relatively recent
account. I now realize that that last preference may have been somewhat misguided, as most
memoirs are apt to discuss developments over a period of years. The choice of this relatively
recent work was nonetheless appropriate for that purpose, insofar as Emily (2000) treats mental
health institutionalization and Freudian analysis as historical artifacts, not granting them much
contemporary relevance.
There were also some negative reasons, criteria of elimination, by which I came to MY
after rejecting other memoirs related to mental health. For purposes of interest and readability, I
1 In these comments on Gordon’s (2000) book, I have decided not to insert topic headings, but rather to
treat this as an essay. The reason is that, in the writing, I found that Gordon’s deftly interwoven story has generated my own interwoven reactions. I wanted, that is, to indulge opportunities to refer seamlessly, back and forth, among the thoughts that I have discussed, without imposing too much rigidity in terms of what each section of the paper is supposed to be saying. This has resulted in a certain loss of simplicity and clarity. I hope the corresponding degree and expression of insight make up for that loss.
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wanted a story that I could relate to, that I would be able to visualize clearly as I went along.
Thus I rejected autism-related memoirs, for example, because I have virtually no experience with
autistic people and would therefore expect to have difficulty visualizing related clinical
anecdotes. I was also suspicious of works that carried a whiff of the incredible. For instance, I
do have an interest in dissociative identity disorder (DID), but I found West’s (1999) claim of 24
separate personalities off-putting. Before investing hours in that text, I would have wanted to
research DID (and West’s book, in particular), to learn how scholars felt about such a claim. As
one other example of such criteria, I was likewise ill-disposed toward sensationalism and
pathologizing, as when Styron (1992) characterizes depression as “madness.”
Having cited readers’ reviews at Amazon.com (2009) as a basis for choosing the book, it
may be appropriate to compare notes with some such readers in the aftermath. I largely disagree
with, for example, the review by “Strigine,” currently designated as most helpful of all readers’
reviews on that website. Strigine states, among other things, that MY examines “the myth that
therapy helps”; that Emily’s parents believed “that therapy, like Jesus, brings salvation”; that
Farber at his worst was “ruinous”; and that Emily “finally lets go of the idea of therapy.” If
Emily’s parents had had such a belief, they would have clung to therapy for themselves. If
Farber had been ruinous, then Emily, his long-term devotee, would have been ruined, and
presumably would not have come back for more, years later. Emily hardly had to “let go” of the
myth that therapy helps; she does not seem to have believed it in the first place, starting with her
years of silent sessions and continuing with the anti-therapist.
Several such reviewers seem to share my disagreement with Strigine on the matter of
Emily’s work with Dr. B. This Emily who was supposedly learning that therapy does not help
somehow decided, as a mature adult, to spend more years with her last therapist – whom she
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considered the “good-enough therapist,” MY, p. 184) than she had spent with any other. As
reader-reviewer Dianne Foster (Amazon.com, 2009) observes, Dr. B expertly helped Emily end
her dependence upon Farber and also upon himself. In an observation offered by another such
reader-reviewer (self-named as simply “A Customer”), Emily acknowledges such achievements
despite her beginning with a decidedly hostile attitude toward this therapist, Dr. B – whom, I
would add, she had hand-picked after an informed and critical search.
Several such reader-reviewers raise concerns that I had not clearly identified during my
own reading, but that I find noteworthy in their articulations. I had not, for example, paid much
attention to the title. It is possible, as Dianne Foster (Amazon.com, 2009) suggests, that it refers
to the client who feeds back the various explanations and beliefs provided by therapists. But that
does not aptly characterize some important behaviors in Emily’s relationships with Farber or
Dr. B. I wondered, instead, whether the intended titular reference is to the reflective style of
therapy, in which the therapist’s remarks could be said to imitate what the client has said; but
that fails too, insofar as most of her therapists did not use that approach. My best explanation is
that the self that Emily presented to the world, during much of her life, was a pastiche of bits and
pieces from all sources, therapeutic and otherwise – that, in other words, the book is a story of
progress in the assembly of a personhood, picking up whatever she could apply to that end from
what was, for her, the inadequate landscape of her youth. Notwithstanding the alleged
plausibility of Emily’s youthful idealization of madness (Donaldson, 2002), she did manage to
generate the foundation for a relatively stable and self-sufficient middle age.
Besides failing to identify such issues as clearly as these other readers did, during the
interlude between my reading of the book and my return to the Amazon.com (2009) reader-
reviewers, I also achieved only an incomplete resolution of the various characterizations of
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Emily’s writing style and perspectives that I had encountered in my pre-reading selection
process. This is, I think, a book that was written by Emily in several parts – in effect, by
somewhat different personalities. It seemed to me that there was a substantial difference in
writing style between the lovingly crafted earlier sections and the forced march, as I experienced
it, of her later account of Dr. B. I can only guess at the specifics that would underlie the process
by which the manuscript thus developed. One possibility, to illustrate my point, would be that
her tales of therapists up through Farber were based upon notes – probably rich, entertaining
notes – accumulated by a younger woman over a period of years, during which she had leisure to
populate the world of therapy with interesting ideas and characters, each granted the indulgence
of time needed for proper portrayal as the novelty that it would be in the young woman’s
experience. By contrast, her perspective on Dr. B was that of an older woman – developed in
retrospect and without the benefit of such marvelous notes, judging from its relative dryness –
who found therapy to be work, not play.
In all events, but especially if I have correctly surmised the general process of the book’s
formation, this is, in good part, a story of Emily’s transition away from a world of debilitating
socioeconomic privilege. The family of her childhood, with its direct or indirect resources
sufficient to afford (indeed, even to contemplate) cocktail hours and years at Riggs (compare
Snowden, 2003), did not fare very well – not as well, in Emily’s telling, as the family of her own
adult life seems to have done. Privilege, traditionally construed, appears to have been especially
hard on Emily’s mother, whose status was reduced in some ways from partner to assistant as the
family ostensibly moved up in society. Nor was privilege very good for Emily, to whom it
evidently imparted a sense of exemption from ordinary obligations. She seems fairly immune to
Farber’s disapproval of her seduction of married men; she apparently understood, but ignored, a
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roommate’s displeasure at the extended alcoholic binges indulged on the premises by her friends;
it never occurred to her to offer payment to Farber. Small wonder that Emily began with such
vigorous opposition to her husband and Dr. B: they appear to have assisted in a substantial part
of the work required for her transition to a more realistically constrained sense of daily living.
She blames herself, more than the men, for such clashes. Men, generally, fare reasonably
well in her story. There are the more or less positive examples of her father and of father-like
Farber, the latter contrasted most tellingly against the irritatingly ineffectual tendernesses of Dr.
S, on one hand, and the clinical remove of Dr. B, on the other. Although she seems to find Dr. S
pathetic, she admits a duty to say a proper goodbye. She does not seem to have blamed her
father’s career advances for his mother’s decompensation; to the contrary, if I recall correctly,
she blames him for declining an opportunity for a further step in that direction. She does not do
much with the obvious opportunity to criticize Freud or male-generated psychology in general,
and does not treat the rape as an opportunity to rant.
Indeed, the rape story is odd in its extreme brevity. That oddity, in the hands of such a
gifted writer, is enormous. Something is not right there. One possibility is that the rape
threatens a good-man myth upon which she bases so much (e.g., her allegiance to Farber, her
pride in her father). But she can differentiate good men from bad. What seems more likely is
that she says so little about the rape because saying more would raise questions she does not
wish to address. She may, for example, have invented it, either to conceal something else or to
manufacture an obscure excuse for marriage, and may realize that elaborating upon the tale
would increase the risk of its debunking. She may have experienced orgasm during the rape, or
may have had some other reaction that she does not know how to process. The rape may fall into
that rare category of experience that exceeds the limits of her resilience or nonchalance. She
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may grant to her rapists no more than what she sees as the necessary minimum acknowledgment
of power over her. Or perhaps she has had so much analysis of the rape, and is so aware of its
potential to complicate her story, that she refuses to discuss it – but she does cite its subsequent
impacts upon her thoughts and plans, and certainly she ponders other, lesser events at greater
length. In short, there remains an exceptional refusal to provide lucid clues on what the rape
story and/or experience is really all about for her.
Resilience and/or nonchalance, in my reading, undermine Geller’s (2001) substantial
acceptance of some of Emily’s claims of therapeutic victimization – regarding, for instance, “the
ruthless stripping away of defenses” and “the powerful reductive suction of psychoanalytic
thinking.” Emily’s tart observations about her early therapists, apparently composed or at least
preliminarily formed contemporaneously, suggest the preservation of a safe zone or observation
platform from which she could skewer her self-styled helpers. Contrary to her profession of
turning “away from the world and toward the self,” this is not a book about the lived experience
of mental illness in any introspective sense. Closer to the mark, what we have here lies on the
frontier (or in the symbiosis) between privileged, extended adolescence and mild antisociality.
She writes so entertainingly, in part, because she still sees humor in boundary transgression:
Emily was not likely to suffer the more profound deterrents, available to less advantaged youths,
of having her ass kicked or thrown in jail for misbehavior.
There are, however, some limits to Emily’s experience of privilege. McIntosh (1997)
would see plenty of white privilege here – it is definitely a white book – but one might want to
refine that with the observation that much of what McIntosh would see exists in any condition of
power and/or homogeneity. Emily got away with a lot, but in another sense she didn’t get away
with enough. Instead of developing and/or blunting her edges in ordinary adolescence, her status
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as a misfit (see Arboleda-Flórez, 2008, p. 2) led her into varying degrees of mental and physical
apartheid. It is easy to second-guess her parents’ decision to enroll her in therapy and then to
send her to Riggs, especially as her story emerges from a putative expert in manipulation of
psychological concepts. But the parents were intelligent people. It is true that her early
therapists failed to socialize her for survival in the world; but her parents’ judgment was that the
world of their time was not capable of doing that either, and that judgment was probably
defensible. In those pre-deinstitutionalization days, the limits of socially acceptable behavior –
the distance you can go before crossing the line at which people write you off rather than put up
with you – had not been stretched to today’s capacious dimensions.
It is not clear that Emily sees this, even now. She refers to “a time when my life was
innocent of therapy” (MY, p. 29), and follows that with an account of an “idyllic” childhood in “a
gentle, fostering place” (p. 33). It’s not terribly hard to imagine how her rage, often mentioned
in the book, and her general “wild and bad behavior” would have gone over in such a place –
regardless of whether that behavior was “mild by today’s standards” (p. 63). She now considers
it naïve to think that mental health clients “were expected to be crazy” (p. 63), but that still seems
to be the standard by which she adjudges herself an unnecessary conscript in the therapeutic
struggle. Her obvious intelligence does tend to support her mother’s (and probably her father’s)
concern about her poor school performance. She was, it seems, not doing very well. So I am not
sure that the problem was therapy. It seems more likely to have been the maintenance of narrow,
rigid concepts of acceptability, to her detriment, by the very childhood community she claims to
adore. Therapy just happened to be the tank into which they tossed the ones that were the wrong
size. In another place and time, she might have been in the asylum, or the circus, or dead; or
maybe a less gentle community would have knocked her into line (see Ramirez, 1999).
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Interestingly, Emily does not make a strong case that therapy stigmatized her. She can’t;
she’s too busy explaining how therapy appealed to her and drew her in. It’s not stigmatizing if
it’s exactly where you want to be. Therapy was accepted; all the more reason to have considered
it appropriate for her. Her argument is, in fact, that therapy has become steadily more accepted,
more universally incorporated into the society – in which case she was ahead of the curve,
prepared to alight at a point in adulthood where the two converged, where to be therapeutically
inclined was to be an ordinary educated American. As if to display a contrarian streak, however,
the approximate time of this realization coincides with the decision process by which she
purportedly came to reject therapy – again, not because of its stigma, but because of its effects on
her motivation, aspirations, self-image, etc.
Compared to the parents, Farber had an easier time of it, in that his effort to bring the
world back into the picture did not entail living with, and worrying about, the development of his
own child. His innovation, according to Spinelli (2002), was to question the adequacy of the
existentialist orientation toward the therapeutic relationship – or even the therapeutic group – as
a “social microcosm” (Yalom, 1995, p. 28) of the client’s experience in the world. The world
needs to be present in therapy; but even that is a step short of considering that the world is
therapy. Farber remains, in Emily’s telling, a romanticized anti-therapist, offering a radical new
concept. Yet perhaps his concept is only a partial step toward the conclusion that therapy is a
poor substitute for life in a healthy society. Emily has not, in the end, embraced any such
realization: she is not actively developing her self, for instance, within the context of, and as a
contributor to, an updated remake of something like the lovely town of childhood recollection. It
is not “an irony” (Miller, 2000) that Farber was her great inspiration; Farber – and, later, Dr. B –
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were, in their individually oriented thinking, as far toward healing as she was prepared to go,
within the cultural constraints of our time.
Hence Emily gives us limited sketches of her parents, evincing the familiar belief that
they would be consummate shapers of the individual in focus, and of course of her therapists; but
her brother, husband, friends, lovers, neighbors, even her child remain remarkably under-
developed in this account. The interpersonal aridity of Camus’s (1989) Stranger comes to mind.
The idea that these people are peripheral to her experiences in therapy is preposterous. She
singles out the alleged envy of the one friend who supposedly shared her idealization of Riggs
(though I would still like to hear the friend’s version of that exchange), but declines to flesh out
the larger circle of individuals – of whom she was surely aware – who would have received the
news of her institutionalization with dismay, ridicule, or perhaps incredulity. If she now
displayed awareness and consideration of such persons, and told us that the turning-inward of
therapy had rendered her deaf to their remarks at the time, then, all right, we might have a sense
of how her departure from therapy is connected with her entry into the world indeed. What we
have instead seems to be more or less the same person with the same self-focus. One could
suggest that therapy, even with Farber, ultimately appealed to her to the extent that it allowed her
to remain who she was – and that we do likewise, to the extent that we applaud her tale.
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References
Amazon.com. (2000). Customer reviews [of] Mockingbird years: A life in and out of therapy.
Retrieved October 5, 2009 from http://www.amazon.com/Mockingbird-Years-Life-Out-
Therapy/product-reviews/0465027288/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&
showViewpoints=1
Arboleda-Flórez, J. (2008). The rights of a powerless legion. In J. Arboleda-Flórez & N.
Sartorius (Eds.), Understanding the stigma of mental illness: Theory and interventions
(pp. 1-17). London: John Wiley & Sons.
Camus, A. (1989). The stranger. New York: Vintage.
Donaldson, E. J. (2002). The corpus of the madwoman: Toward a feminist disability studies
theory of embodiment and mental illness. NWSA Journal, 14(3), 99-119.
Geller, J. L. (2001). [Review of the book.] Psychiatric Services, 52, 695-696.
Gordon, E. F. (2000). Mockingbird years: A life in and out of therapy. New York: Basic.
McIntosh, P. (1997). White privilege and male privilege: A personal account of coming to see
correspondences through work in women’s studies. In R. Delgado & J. Stefancic (Eds.),
Critical white studies: Looking behind the mirror (pp. 291-299). Philadelphia: Temple
University Press.
Miller, L. (2000). “Mockingbird Years” and “The Last Good Freudian”: Two memoirists look
back on their many years of psychotherapy – and what they see ain’t pretty. Retrieved
October 7, 2009 from
http://www.archive.salon.com/books/review/2000/06/14/gordon_webster/index.html
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Ramirez, T. M. (1999). Feeling different: A major mental health problem in a diverse society. In
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9). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Rodriguez, C. (2000). Culturally sensitive psychological assessment. In I. B. Canino & J.
Spurlock (Eds.), Culturally diverse children and adolescents: Assessment, diagnosis, and
treatment (pp. 84-91). New York: Guilford.
Snowden, L. R. (2003). Bias in mental health assessment and intervention: Theory and evidence.
American Journal of Public Health, 93(2), 239-243.
Spinelli, E. (2002). The therapeutic relationship as viewed by existential psychotherapy: Re-
embracing the world. Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy, 32(1), 111-118.
Styron, W. (1992). Darkness visible: A memoir of madness. New York: Vintage.
West, C. (1999). First person plural: My life as a multiple. New York: Hyperion.
Yalom, I. D. (1995). The theory and practice of group psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books.